I confess. I’m a notebook nut. I own dozens and dozens of them. Everything from cheap reporter’s notebooks to hand-crafted Italian leather beauties.

I wondered: Am I an analog dinosaur, or are there others out there like me?

The first stop in my investigation was, frankly, discouraging.

At first glance, a Starbucks on the campus of George Washington University points to the dinosaur conclusion. So plentiful are the laptops and tablets that they outnumber the double-mocha-half-caf-triple-shot-Frappuccinos.

Oddly enough, the analog company’s success has grown in tandem with the digital revolution. In fact, when conducting market research, the company detected something even more perplexing: a direct correlation between sales of its little black notebooks and proximity to an Apple store.

That led Moleskine CEO Arrigo Berni to conclude that his customers are “not people who are clinging to paper with a nostalgic feeling, but rather people that have both digital and analog as part of their lives.”

Yes, he says, we live in an increasingly digital world, but we “still have a need for physical experience, for emotional experiences that digital devices and technology” don’t always provide.

Besides, he adds, for so-called digital natives, iPhones and other high-tech gadgets are commonplace. Paper is the curiosity.

Consider the case of Angelia Trinidad, recent college graduate and self-proclaimed gadget freak.

Not that long ago, she found herself adrift, professionally and emotionally, so she sought out a planner, a paper planner. None felt quite right so she designed her own.

Friends urged her to launch a digital version of her planner, but she resisted.

“I put my foot down,” Trinidad says. “I said ‘no apps.’ ”

She has nothing against apps — her smart phone is chockablock with them — but she finds paper more intimate.

“It’s this thing that is so intuitive. It’s between you and paper and a pen. It’s kind of meditative,” she says. “When I’m on the phone, it’s never meditative. It’s always task-y.”

Paper, Trinidad says, makes the abstract tangible, in a way that digital devices don’t.

“I feel there’s a huge need for paper in this increasingly digital world,” she adds. “I look at my planner and I think of it as my second brain. I look back at something on there and it’s like, ‘Oh, I wrote that.’ ”

I know what she means. As a writer, no work feels complete until I hit the print button and it’s on paper. Maybe, though, Angelia and I are both dinosaurs, albeit from different generations.

But some recent research suggests otherwise. Pam Mueller was a teaching assistant for an introductory psychology class at UCLA. One day, she forgot to bring her laptop to class.

“So I took notes, you know, the old-fashioned way, the way I did in college — pen and paper,” she explains. “I thought I got so much more out of the lecture that day.”

She mentioned this to her professor, Daniel Oppenheimer. It turns out that he had asimilar experience in a faculty meeting. He was dutifully taking notes on his laptop but realized he had no idea what people were saying.

Oppenheimer and Mueller wondered if there was something about paper and the act of writing that explained this phenomenon, so they conducted an experiment.

They asked about 50 students to attend a lecture. Half took notes on laptops and half with pen and paper. Both groups were then given a comprehension test.

Mueller attributes this unexpected finding — published in the journal, Psychological Science — to the fact that the “analog” note takers were forced to synthesize rather than merely transcribe. It’s a phenomenon known as “desirable difficulty.”

“Desirable difficulty is some small roadblock that is in your path that actually improves your understanding of a topic,” she explains.

This is, admittedly, a hard sell on college campuses, she concedes.

“Students find it hard to believe that more content isn’t better,” she adds, “that they aren’t going to just get it all down now and study it later.”

Mueller, though, has taken her research findings to heart. Whenever she needs to truly grasp a subject, she ditches the laptop and takes notes with old-fashioned pen and paper.

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Maybe you saw the recent, disheartening news that New Yorkers have longer work weeks than residents of any other major U.S. city. One of the main reasons the New York City work week is so long, according to the new report by city comptroller Scott M. Stringer, is that commuting takesfor-freaking-ever. Each week, an average New Yorker spends six hours and 18 minutes commuting, well above the national average of four hours and 11 minutes.

With this in mind, Science of Us took a dive into the scientific literature on commuting. Here are the best facts we found on the daily routine, and the variety of ways it’s sucking the soul right out of you. (The short version is: Commuting is mostly terrible and you should probably work from home if you can.)

The worst thing you’ll do all day is your morning commute.Social scientists Daniel Kahneman and Alan B. Krueger surveyed about 900 women in Texas, asking which of their daily activities made them happiest. At the very bottom of the list — worse than working or cleaning house — was the morning commute. (The evening commute, incidentally, is the third worst thing you’ll do all day, according to this sample.)

You’ll never get used to it. It’s awful every day, but each day carries its own particular awfulness. “You can’t adapt to commuting, because it’s entirely unpredictable,” Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilberthas said. “Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.”

But you’ll be happiest if you walk, bike, or take the train. People who commute in these three ways are more satisfied with their commutes than people who drive, take the bus, or take the subway, according to a McGill University survey of 3,377 commuters in Montreal.

A longer commute might even ruin your marriage. A decade-longstudy of 2 million married people in Sweden found that couples with long commutes — defined here as 45 minutes, by car — were 40 percent more likely to divorce than couples who never commuted. (Hat tip to our pals at Science of Relationships for covering that one.)

But, weirdly, your relationship might be happier if you commute in the same direction. A study of 280 married couples in the U.S. and 139 in Hong Kong found that the couples who headed to work in the same direction tended to be more satisfied in their relationships. It’s perhaps one of those small, meaningless similarities that people may unconsciously value for no logical reason (like sharing a birthday), the researchers theorized.

Time spent commuting is time spent not exercising. Also: not cooking and not sleeping. According to an analysis of data culled from five years of the American Time Use Survey, “Each minute spent commuting is associated with a 0.0257 minute exercise time reduction, a 0.0387 minute food preparation time reduction, and a 0.2205 minute sleep time reduction.” And when people with long commutes do exercise, they tend to do so at lower intensity than people with shorter commutes. Who has the energy for intervals after fighting your way on and off the train?

A lengthy commute might make people less politically active.Researchers used data from a Georgetown University survey of 1,001 Americans, with questions that covered a wide variety of topics, including work, commute length, and political participation (defined as voting and donating money to a political organization or group, among other things). And they found that the more time people spent commuting, the less likely they were to be politically active. Compared to someone who works from home, a person with an hour-long commute is 12 percent less likely to participate in politics, according to their findings.

How telecommuters have it made, by the numbers. Whencompared to “extreme commuters” — those whose total daily commute time exceeds three hours, people who work from home sleep 44.7 minutes more and spend 63 percent more time exercising. (The average commute — 50 minutes — doesn’t have quite so dire an impact, resulting in only 11.03 minutes of lost sleep and just 1.29 minutes of lost exercise relative to telecommuters.)

Money helps matters, though. A relatively famous study suggested that, all else being equal, for a person with an hour-long commute to be as happy as a telecommuter, the commuter’s salary would have to be 40 percent higher than their work-from-home buddy’s.

There is another way to make a commute happier, but it is terrifying. When University of Chicago psychologist Nicholas Epley asked suburban Chicago commuters to chat with strangers on the train, he found that they ended up enjoying the ride that day more than they usually did. (However, I tried this last summer and cannot in good conscience recommend it.)

There is at least one good thing about commuting. For some people, report researchers at the University of California Transportation Center, the ride home is a time to decompress, let go of work stress, and make the transition back to home life.

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Einstein warned that technology could surpass human interaction. It’s happening, and workplaces have to step in when employees can’t kick the habit

‘Accessing their work email in the evening or while on holiday can have a hugely negative impact on quality of life.’ Photograph: Alamy

Social media damaging our work-life balance – that was the subject of the talk I gave to the British Psychological Society in Liverpool a few weeks ago. My topic was “mental capital and wellbeing at work”: the need for people to have control or autonomy in the job; to be managed by praise and reward rather than fault-finding; to have manageable workloads and achievable deadlines; and, most importantly, to have some balance in their lives.

I highlighted research that showed that consistently working long hours was having a damaging effect on the health of workers, their family life and their productivity. I mentioned that the work-life balance of most people was made worse by emails, by the unending electronic overload experienced by many of us, day in, day out. Smartphones and tablets mean that people who access their emails in the evening and on holidays – when families should be spending time together without work interference – were potentially damaging their health and productivity. And although my comments on emails represented only a few minutes of my one-hour presentation, the audience overwhelmingly picked up on the issue, and so did the press.

Email and social media have served a very important purpose in the workplace, and have been an enabler in communications and virtual work relationships. The downsides, however, now outweigh the benefits, and these include: unmanageable workloads (when faced with an excessive email inbox), the loss of face-to-face relationships with colleagues; and the misuse of emails to avoid having face-to-face discussions about difficult work-related issues. As Einstein once wrote: “I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction, the world will then have a generation of idiots.”

The adverse consequences extend beyond the workplace and into employees’ homes, as communication technologies encourage people to access their work well into the evenings and holidays. This can have a hugely negative impact on quality of life. How often have we seen families out for dinner where parents (and children) are looking at their mobiles for text messages or emails rather than listening to one another? How often have working parents come home to access emails on their smartphones at dinner or when the family is spending time together? Can this lack of communication within the family create problems that have a negative spillover effect into the workplace?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating dumping emails or texting, but suggesting that we all must begin to manage this technology, rather than let it manage us. Employers should be encouraging their employees, as some are currently doing, to avoid accessing emails at night or during their holidays, unless absolutely necessary. They should provide guidelines to employees on how to minimise overload on others (for example, cc-ing only if others are directly involved in the issue); avoiding sending emails to colleagues in the same building – thereby encouraging face-to-face interactions; and ensuring that anybody sending an email should let the receiver know how important their response is, and by when their response is required.

Some firms – whose employees are not listening and are continuing to overload themselves and others – are shutting down the servers at night. I don’t advocate this, but a strong message has to be given if our businesses are to be more healthy and more productive. As John Ruskin, the social reformer, wrote in 1851: “In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it, they must not do too much of it, and they must have a sense of success in it.”

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One of the most powerful forms of influence, according to psychologist Robert Cialdini’s famous analysis, is authority — often derived from perceived expertise. When a doctor advises us to exercise more, or a Nobel Laureate raises questions about a certain economic policy, we’re likely to pay much more attention than if a random person offered the same counsel. In our professional lives, this principle can be a boon: if you have a Ph.D. in a subject, or have worked in the industry for 20 years, or are seen to be an expert because you write for a certain publication, you have an increased ability to influence others.

But what if you don’t have those credentials? As I describe in my new book Stand Out, when you’re just starting out in a field, or lack blue-chip affiliations, it may be hard to persuade others to listen to your ideas, if they’re groundbreaking and valuable. Here are four strategies to help you overcome your perceived lack of expertise and ensure you can make an impact.

The first step, if you aren’t yet seen as an expert in your own right, is to borrow others’ expertise. If you’re a thoughtful curator of the best ideas in your field, even if you’re not developing them yourself, others will start turning to you for guidance. “Originality can be overrated,” says Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50. He cited Malcolm Gladwell and Daniel Goleman (of Emotional Intelligence fame) as examples of thought leaders who are actually “synthesizers” of information. Says Dearlove, “These guys bring communication skills and an ability to bring complex ideas and make something out of them, but it’s not their [original] research.”

You and Your Team

Another strategy to gain more influence for your ideas is finding commonality with your audience, a technique that makes them far more receptive to hearing from you. In Stand Out, I profileRobbie Kellman Baxter, a consultant who earned her MBA from Stanford and, as an active alumni volunteer, now derives more than half of her business from her fellow graduates. “The reason it’s good for your business is that you’re able to form genuine relationships with like-minded people very quickly, and to me, that’s the definition of good networking,” she says. “There’s a kind of trust: I know what you went through because I went through it, too.”

It’s also important to be strategic about how and where you’re applying your persuasion techniques. In my previous career as a presidential campaign spokesperson, we frequently createdpowermaps, which identified who the relevant decision maker was on an issue, who she listened to for advice, and how close we were to those advisers. The goal was to create an “echo chamber” effect, in which – even if we couldn’t reach the target directly – we could ensure she would hear about our position favorably from a variety of sources. Powermapping is a highly targeted form of influence that can enable you to bypass objections about your own level of expertise on the subject.

Finally, the best antidote if you’re lacking an expert reputation now is to start creating one ASAP. Creating original content is the single most effective way to develop an expert reputation. Though the best channel will vary (photographers and chefs should double down on Instagram, while it’s less helpful for attorneys and insurance brokers), blogging is a good bet for most professionals. In just an hour or two a week, you can begin to demonstrate how you think about the issues facing your field and sharing your unique point of view. Your content creation sparks a virtuous circle: because reporters looking for comment almost always start their articles with an online search, if your name keeps coming up as someone writing about the issues, they’re likely to contact you, reinforcing your expert reputation with third-party validation.

If you’re not yet considered an expert, it’s harder to get your ideas noticed — but not impossible. With these strategies, you can begin to overcome others’ resistance and make sure your voice is heard.

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10 ways to be better at both sides of the conversation

There are two sides to every http://www.ghpub.co.uk/ conversation, and both are essential to the art of communication.

So, how are your conversation skills? Think about it: Are you a smooth talker, or do you ramble? Are you an attentive listener, or do you tend to interrupt?

Here’s how to master the art of conversation—both sides of it:

When it’s your turn to talk…

1. Get your thinking straight. The most common source of confusing messages is muddled thinking. We have an idea we haven’t thought through. Or we have so much we want to say that we can’t possibly say it. Or we have an opinion that is so strong we can’t michael kors outlet uk keep it in. As a result, we are ill-prepared when we speak, and we confuse everyone. The first rule of plain talk, then, is to think before you say anything. Organize your thoughts.

2. Say what you mean. Say exactly what you mean.

3. Get to the point. don’t beat around the bush. If you want something, ask for it. If you want someone to do something, say exactly what you want done.

4. Be concise. Don’t waste words. Confusion grows in direct proportion to the number of words used. Speak plainly and briefly, using the shortest, most familiar words.

5. Be real. Each of us has a personality—a blending of traits, thought patterns and mannerisms—which can aid us in communicating clearly. For maximum clarity, be natural and let the real you come through. You’ll be more convincing and much more comfortable.

6. Speak in images. The cliché that “a picture is worth a thousand words” isn’t always true. But words that help people visualize concepts can be tremendous aids in communicating a message.

But talking, or sending messages, is only half the process. To be a truly accomplished communicator, you must also know how to listen, or receive messages.

If you’re approaching a railroad crossing around a blind curve, you can send a message with your car horn. But that’s not the most important part of your communication task. The communication that counts takes place when you stop, look and listen—a useful admonition for conversation, too.

So, when it’s your turn to listen…

1. Do it with thought and care. Listening, like speaking and writing, requires genuine interest and attention. If you don’t, you won’t learn much, and you won’t remember much of what you do learn. Most of us retain only 25 percent of what we hear—so if you can increase your retention and your comprehension, you can increase your effectiveness.

A sign on the wall of Lyndon Johnson’s Senate office put it in a down-to-earth way: “When you’re talking, you ain’t learning.”

2. Use your eyes. If you listen only with your ears, you’re missing out on much of the message. Good listeners keep their eyes open while listening. Look for feelings. The face is an eloquent communication medium—learn to read its messages. While the speaker is delivering a verbal message, the face can be saying, “I’m serious,” “Just kidding,” “It pains me to be telling you this,” or “This gives me great pleasure.”

3. Observe these nonverbal signals when listening to people:

• Rubbing one eye. When you hear “I guess you’re right,” and the speaker is rubbing one eye, guess again. Rubbing one eye often is a signal that the speaker is having trouble inwardly accepting something.

• Tapping feet. When a statement is accompanied by foot-tapping, it usually indicates a lack of confidence in what is being said.

• Rubbing fingers. When you see the thumb and forefinger rubbing together, it often means that the speaker is holding something back.

• Staring and blinking. When you see the other person staring at the ceiling and blinking rapidly, the topic at hand is under consideration.

• Crooked smiles. Most genuine smiles are symmetrical. And most facial expressions are fleeting. If a smile is noticeably crooked, you’re probably looking at a fake one.

• Eyes that avoid contact. Poor eye contact can be a, but it can also indicate that the speaker is not being truthful.

It would be unwise to make a decision based solely on these visible signals. But they can give you valuable tips on the kind of questions to ask and the kind of answers to be alert for.

4. Make things easy. People who are poor listeners will find few who are willing to come to them with useful information. Good listeners make it easy on those to whom they want to listen. They make it clear that they’re interested in what the other person has to say.

George Eliot: Arbury Hall, WarwickshireBorn Mary Ann Evans, George Eliot grew up close to Arbury Hall, where her father was employed as land agent. It provided her with a rich seam of material which she exploited in three Warwickshire stories, Scenes of Clerical Life. Later novels also drew on life at Arbury. Eliot was intrigued by the history of the house and its Gothic remodelling, which took more than 50 years to complete. As a child, she would accompany her father to the hall, where she had free run of the rooms and browsed in the library.

Dylan Thomas: The Boat House, CarmarthenshireThomas moved to the Boat House at Laugharne, 40 miles west of Swansea, in 1949. It was the house of which the poet and his wife always dreamed. The view from his writing shed – a ‘water and tree room on the cliff’ – inspired many of his poems. Here he would observe the eternal cycle of the tide and the variable, often dramatic, weather conditions of the estuary. Visitors find the cluttered study strewn with books, cigarette packets and discarded notes, just as it was when Thomas was working.

Jane Austen: Chawton House, HampshireChawton was the family home of Jane Austen in the early part of the 19th century. Today, the house is a museum, retaining the air and atmosphere of a modest country home. While at Chawton, Jane prepared breakfast in the dining room every day at about 9am. She worked at a three-legged table in the parlour, which is where she made revisions to Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice before publication. Sometimes she would be struck by a thought or an idea and would rush from the room to her writing desk.

Frances Hodgson Burnett:Great Maytham Hall, Kent
One day, while in the garden at Great Maytham Hall, Frances Hodgson Burnett was distracted by a solitary robin, leading her to discover a door concealed by ivy in one of the mellow brick walls. On the other side lay an overgrown 18th-century garden, which she transformed. Hodgson Burnett’s stroke of good fortune inspired her most enduring work, The Secret Garden, which was published in 1911.

Agatha Christie: Greenway, DevonOverlooking a glorious sweep of the River Dart in Devon, Greenway once belonged to Agatha Christie. The Grade II-listed Georgian house makes an appearance in several of her novels and was the setting for one of Christie’s pre-publication rituals. The Queen of Crime would read a chapter from her new whodunnit to her family and ask if they could unmask the killer. Often, Christie’s husband, Max Mallowan, would wake from his evening slumber and correctly identify the murderer.

Photograph: PA/PA

John Keats: Keats house, LondonKeats rented Wentworth Place (now known as Keats House) in Hampstead, for £5 a month (about £250 today), plus half the liquor bill. His life changed immeasurably in 1819 when Mrs Brawne, a widow, and her three children moved in next door. Eighteen-year-old Fanny captured the poet’s heart from the moment he met her. The parlour now holds bookcases filled with publications known to have been in Keats’s library.

Henry James and EF Benson:Lamb House, East Sussex
Henry James first saw Lamb House, situated in the picturesque East Sussex Cinque Port of Rye, in a watercolour belonging to an architect friend. Over subsequent summers, James could be found ‘casting sheep’s eyes at Lamb House’. In 1898 he discovered that the owner had died and Lamb House was available to rent. He wasted no time in purchasing the lease ‘on quite deliciously moderate terms’. Lamb House later became the home of EF Benson, whose Mapp and Lucia was adapted for television by the BBC in 2014.

Lord Byron: Newstead Abbey, NottinghamshireOverlooking lakes, gardens and 300 acres of parkland, Newstead Abbey was almost in ruins when Byron inherited the estate at the age of ten. In addition to hosting wild parties, he indulged in pistol practice in the Great Hall, boxed in the drawing room and allowed a tame bear and a wolf to roam the corridors.

Lucy M Boston:The Manor, Heminford Grey, Cambridgeshire
Continuously occupied for nearly 900 years, this is one of England’s oldest houses, with thick stone walls and Norman features. Just weeks before the outbreak of the second world war, the manor became the home of the writer Lucy M Boston who imagined the wonderful old house and its garden as the backdrop to herGreene Knowe stories for children, published between 1954 and 1961.

The Brontë sisters:The Parsonage, West Yorkshire
‘Haworth expresses the Brontës; the Brontës express Haworth,’ wrote Virginia Woolf after a visit to the home of the three sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne. ‘They fit like a snail to its shell.’ One of the first things visitors see is the dining room, which was also a parlour where family members gathered and where the Brontë sisters fleshed out their novels, endlessly circling the table and reading extracts aloud to each other. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were written here.